Moore, Juliannebyname of Julie Anne Smith ( born December 3, 1960 , Fort Bragg, North Carolina, U.S.American actress known for her exacting and sympathetic portrayals of women at odds with their surroundings, often in films that examined social issues.

Smith was the eldest of three children; her American father was a military lawyer and judge, and her Scottish immigrant mother was a homemaker who later in life became a psychiatric social worker. She earned a bachelor’s degree in acting from Boston University in 1983 and moved to New York City soon thereafter. Smith assumed the stage name Julianne Moore, the latter portion of which was her father’s middle name, because all variations of her own name were already registered with the Actors’ Equity Association. She appeared in several plays and television programs before beginning a three-year arc on the soap opera As the World Turns in 1985. Her portrayals of a psychologist and, eventually, her half sister, earned her a Daytime Emmy Award in 1988. Meanwhile, she had appeared in Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater (1987) and trod the boards as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet (1988) staged by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She returned to the Public Theater in two Churchill one-acts—staged as Ice Cream with Hot Fudge—in 1990.

A supporting role in the domestic thriller film The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) brought Moore to wider attention. Her bold turn as an artist in director Robert Altman’s ensemble drama Short Cuts (1993) was particularly remarked upon. Altman had cast Moore after seeing her in a long-running New York workshop production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which was filmed by Louis Malle as Vanya on 42nd Street (1994). Her first starring role was in Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), in which she played a woman succumbing to an indeterminate malady.

Though Moore had bit roles in mainstream fare such as The Fugitive (1993), her first marquee billing came with the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World (1997), in which she played a paleontologist. She returned to her indie roots with the family drama The Myth of Fingerprints (1997), which was directed by future husband Bart Freundlich (they married in 2003). That performance, however, was eclipsed by her turn as kindly pornographic actress Amber Waves in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997); her complex and sympathetic portrayal earned Moore her first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actress. She then played a narcissistic artist in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998) and the calculating Mrs. Cheveley in the film adaptation (1999) of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband.

In both Neil Jordan’s adaptation (1999) of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), Moore’s characters dealt with the ramifications of adultery. The former film earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. In 2001 she assumed the role of FBI agent Clarice Starling—originated by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—in its sequel, Hannibal. Her renderings of women suffocated by the repressive social mores of the 1950s in Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002) and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002) led to best actress and best supporting actress Oscar nods, respectively. Moore followed several tepidly received relationship comedies with Alfonso Cuarón’s much-lauded futuristic dystopia Children of Men (2006) and later a vampy turn as the unstable Barbara Baekeland (who married the heir to the Bakelite fortune and was murdered by her son) in Savage Grace (2007). She gave more-subdued performances as a woman in love with her gay best friend (played by Colin Firth) in fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man (2009); a woman who cheats on her lesbian partner in The Kids Are All Right (2010); and an unhappy woman married to Steve Carell’s character in Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). She later played won an Emmy for her role as 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in the HBO film Game Change (2012).

Moore also wrote the children’s book Freckleface Strawberry (2007), about her experiences with childhood bullying due to her red hair and freckles. She penned two sequels, and in 2010 the first volume was adapted as a stage musical.